The British Phantom Airship ("Scareship") Wave of 1909

Spring 1909. Britain was on edge. The Dreadnought naval panic of March had only just passed, and fear of German spies ran high. Flight was suddenly real. The Wrights had flown in public in 1908, and Zeppelins were in the news.

At about 5 a.m. on March 23, 1909, PC Kettle was on patrol on Cromwell Road, Peterborough. He heard "the steady buzz of a high-power engine" and took it for a distant motor car. Then he realised it was overhead. "My eye was at once attracted by a powerful light, which I should judge to have been some 1,200 feet above the ground," he said. "I also saw a dark body, oblong and narrow in shape, outlined against the stars." It crossed the sky at high speed.

By May the reports were pouring in. They came from Ipswich and Birmingham. At Clacton-on-Sea, Egerton Free reported a craft hovering at about 600 ft. At Cardiff docks, signalman Charles Westlake saw a searchlight and heard a "whizzing" sound. Pontypool, Kingstown and Belfast followed.

Midnight, 19 May. Mr Chatten, a grocer's assistant, was cycling home near Tharston in Norfolk. Above him passed a long cigar-shaped object, "400 ft long, rapidly moving towards Norwich". He heard no motor. The Standard summed it up: "With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights."

The strangest account came from Charles W. Lethbridge, a Punch-and-Judy showman from Cardiff. On Caerphilly Mountain he found "a long, tube-shaped affair lying on the grass on the roadside", about 45 ft long. Two men in "big, heavy, fur coats" were with it. As he came within twenty yards they "jumped up and jabbered furiously to each other in a strange lingo". The object began to rise.

The men jumped into "a kind of little carriage suspended from it". Clear of the telegraph wires, it "turned on two lights and headed towards Cardiff." The press later reported marks on the ground and scraps of paper left at the spot. Lethbridge stuck to his story.

At Clacton, a strange object was found on 16 May. A dark grey rubber bag with a steel rod through it, stamped "Müller Fabrik Bremen". Inquiries in Bremen explained nothing. The War Office and the Aeronautical Society reportedly made "extensive inquiries" without result. No official conclusion ever came. No photograph of a scareship is known.

Many papers blamed German Zeppelins. Yet Zeppelins lacked the range or power for such speeds and did not reach Britain until 1914. Then Percival Spencer announced that his family firm had sold several small airships for advertising. He offered no evidence linking them to the sightings, but the papers accepted it. The stories turned sceptical, then humorous.

Historian Brett Holman points to C. D. Clayton, who organised an advertising flight for Spencer in 1910, as probably "the creative genius behind this whole affair". Mike Dash wrote that investigators found many simpler sightings were planets and stars, and many of the more complex ones hoaxes. David Clarke argues that all were misidentifications. Holman's verdict: "The press didn't create the phantom airships, but it did affect how they were interpreted."

Charles Fort gathered the reports in Lo! in 1931, the Welsh showman's airship and its "foreign crew" among them. The same year brought airship waves over New Zealand and Australia. And the scareships would return to British skies in 1912 and 1913.